


Far Enough

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Acceptance and Trust, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Catholicism, Established Relationship, Humanstuck, Introspection, M/M, Mentions of the Ultimate Self from the Epilogues, References to Supernatural (TV), So I'll tag, Swearing, alcohol mention, inspired by the first few seasons of Supernatural, the premise of hunting stuff/the vibe/some of the imagery I mean mostly, which I'm pretty amazed you can tag!!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:41:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25623055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: “Even as I left Florida — far enough, far enough, wasn’t far enough.  Couldn’t quite seem to escape myself, far enough, far enough, far from Florida.” — “Florida,” Modest MouseGamzee and Karkat hunt dangerous creatures.  Their latest fight went a little bit wrong.
Relationships: Gamzee Makara/Karkat Vantas
Comments: 10
Kudos: 20





	Far Enough

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there~ I hope you enjoy this fic, if you read it. :D I had a lot of fun with this... in my quest to write a fic referencing every song on the Modest Mouse album “We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank,” this is song/story 8. (For some reason, my fics mysteriously switched posting order, so I guess this is #7 now???? I did post them on the same night...) I’m sorry for anything and everything I might’ve messed up.
> 
> Thank you!!! I hope you’ve been staying safe/doing well.

1: What We Do, Who We Are

(Or, Maybe Something Like, It Started with the Ghosts)

Gamzee’s boyfriend was stubbornly — devotedly, teeth-grittingly — acting like everything was okay since the two of them all got tangled up with the Mirror-Born a week or so back... but Gamzee knew there was a wrongness in the air between them, clinging like bonfire smoke over an open grave, sticky like bug spray deep in the wettest gulping parts of a swamp, hunting a beast made of dried skin and rusty lost fishhooks. Karkat squirmed in his seat as he drove, scratching at a sunburn on his neck, checking his cracked-screen phone map. Shooting Gamzee exhausted, calculating eyes when he didn’t get to thinking like Gamzee could see him. 

What was Karkat looking for, in Gamzee’s motherfucking face? If it was a smile, Gamzee gave it. If it was apology, Gamzee’d fucking offered that, too, brother, even when the Mirror-Born still had them both. And again, mushy and slurring from too much to drink; and again in musty unwashed motel rooms, his huge soft arm slung around Karkat from behind. Gamzee was a big guy, and maybe his feet hung off the edge of the bed. Maybe the mattress springs groaned beneath him. Karkat was all wiry muscle, like somebody’d shaped him out of twisted-up metal hangers, and his grip on Gamzee’s hand had been so tight it almost hurt. 

I’m sorry the Mirror-Born showed you what you saw. What I’d be capable of, if I slipped away from you. But I motherfucking won’t, you motherfucking hear me? But I’m right here with you, driving past plastic-y palm trees and gated houses we could never afford. We’ve been together since the start of this, and I’m all sorts of freaking out at my own self, too. But I’m with you.

Everything had started with the ghosts, you know, the ghosts one of Gamzee and Karkat’s old, old friends drew out of their graves to get some fucking justice going. But the motherfucker who was all supposed to receive that righteous justice thought maybe the dead would trickle quietly back into the mud once their summoner was dead... and so. And so she did her in, and the ghosts took their town. They were furious, bleeding souls by then, and they’d needed some help getting back into the truly goddamned dirt. Gamzee and Karkat had got on to helping them. 

They’d been running ever since, from town to town, from name to name. They kept monsters out of closets, and demons wheedling promises from inside their circles of salt. They were on their way driving out of Florida, now, under a hot sun; they’d met so many would-be gods, but Karkat still claimed to be “Functionally Atheist.” Gamzee wore a St. Michael the Archangel pendant around his neck, even in the shower, and felt sort of blurry and hopeful trying to remember what it had been like holding a candle at Easter Vigil Mass, with chanted hymns all around and firelight casting crooked shadows across all his dad’s old church friends’ faces like masks. He’d thought he understood exactly how the world worked, once. There had been more to all of this than Gamzee could have ever fucking known, but maybe... yeah. Maybe he still hoped he’d meet an actual angel, one of these days, or hear a voice like the god that had raised him. Maybe he still tried to have faith. 

The grass in Florida was rubbery and unnaturally green, to Gamzee’s eye — it was full of fire ants and the kinda sprinklers that churned out well water, sour and heavy like rotten eggs, spilling over the sidewalks. They’d been driving all morning, and sure as hell they’d drive the rest of the day, too. Gotta be to their next job soon as possible... the longer they waited around, the worse the situation was sure to fucking get. 

What was Karkat hoping to find, watching Gamzee eat a fucking take-out fried fish sandwich, silver-plated juggling clubs resting with his huge-ass shoes on the floor of the car? Gamzee wasn’t much of a marksman, usually — he _usually_ left the salt bullets to Karkat, and threw himself straight into their fights, rotten bones snapping in his hands, bile squelching across his clothes. Knives and crooked-nail bats and shit. But the Mirror-Born who’d reflected Gamzee back had been a crack-shot, a crack-up. He’d been making such awful, drawling jokes in Gamzee’s own voice; he’d said Karkat’s blood would be the motherfucking punchline. He hadn’t missed a single shot he tried to make... so now Gamzee sure as fuck wasn’t gonna go around holding a gun, get it? So now he met Karkat’s eyes trying to look steady and careless, licking a little grease off the edge of his lip, and Karkat squeezed his shoulder. It felt protective; it felt nervous; it felt like Gamzee was being held in place, as if Karkat was afraid he’d barrel-roll out of the car any minute now, or be carried away by the wind. 

“You doing okay, there?” Gamzee asked.

“Yeah.” Karkat’s voice was locked-up like the arsenal in the back of their car, like the ammo carefully labeled in Karkat’s own blocky capslock handwriting. “Why don’t you get some sleep? I... I know you didn’t sleep last night, Gamzee.”

“Shit. What gave me away?”

“Just... sleep.”

2: Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going

(Or, Maybe Something Like, It’s a Rude Fucking Trick to Show What’s Possible)

When they weren’t reflecting any breathing motherfucker back, the Mirror-Born were like dripping silver, like an actual mirror-surface slithering away. Sometimes they left well enough alone, just like so many other creatures — sometimes they only wanted to live, whatever had brought them out into this fucking world in the first place. Gamzee didn’t know, but people you came across had their stories: the Mirror-Born had trickled in from the backwards space on the other side of the looking-glass, or they were aliens, or they were a wish gone wrong a long time ago and come to actual impossible life. The prayer had been to see inside a loved one’s soul, maybe. The prayer had been to truly know yourself and all the things you could be — your personal motherfucking apotheosis. And maybe some unspeakable somebody had decided to answer that prayer, or maybe some rogue scientist-enchanter-type had cooked ‘em up in a lab way back when. Who knows?

Whatever the fuck they were, it could be a real shitshow when one of the Mirror-Born went after somebody living. They got hired as assassins, sometimes — as revenge, as ruination, as atonement. Sometimes a poor asshole just happened to piss one of the Mirror-Born right off, and then next thing you knew their town got smudged off the fucking map. Gamzee had seen apartments seething with stolen chemical waste, and fancy-ass theaters on fire, and all sorts of ridiculous noise. Faces carved off, claimed back from the mirror. Nobody liked being followed by their worst possible self, just like nobody liked watching their family fall in happy and relieved next to their best possible self. Either way, it was a rude fucking trick, wasn’t it? Either way, it stirred everybody up like a boiling bowl of ready-make mac and cheese flooding your goddamn microwave. 

Gamzee and Karkat had been trying to get this particular troop of Mirror-Born to leave some terrified college student alone. The kid had tried dating one of the Mirror-Born without even realizing it — they’d been reflecting back somebody else’s face at the time, see. It had gone pretty bad, and by the time Gamzee and Karkat rolled into town the student who‘d accidentally started everything was already in the hospital, plugged into all sorts of humming machines. It was gonna be okay, now. It was all gonna be okay-ish, okay as something like that _could_ be... but as Gamzee settled down into his car seat — he sat with the chair cranked way back, and there still wasn’t really enough legroom or a good place to put his elbows — Karkat was giving him such careful eyes. Not angry. Not exactly. 

There it was again: the wrongness in the air.

Karkat and Gamzee had been through dozens of cars, since starting this gig up. Enough people were chasing them, it only made sense. Karkat had said next time they’d try harder to find something Gamzee could feel comfortable in; Karkat always said that. Now, he slapped his hand lightly over Gamzee’s eyes. Closing them. The gesture would’ve been playful, except Karkat looked so tired. He slipped on some blackout sunglasses Gamzee’d lifted from a gas station, next, and pulled over to a new stretch of the highway. 

Of course Gamzee and Karkat had both known what the Mirror-Born could do — of course they’d fought stranger, hungrier creatures, even just that year. (Woulda been that _season_ , if this was a fucking TV show. Karkat said stuff like that, sometimes... “That was a season-finale fight, back there. I say we lay low for about five million years.”) They just hadn’t gambled on any of the Mirror-Born actually catching them alone... they just hadn’t... 

Shit. The Mirror-Born liked hiding in plain sight, when they were hunting some sorry motherfucker. They slicked themselves down your drain, maybe, and watched from the dark wet places... they waited between the cracks in the sidewalk, with cigarette butts and dandelions and all that. Gamzee had thought he was careful —

Not careful enough. Gamzee knew he wouldn’t get his own rattling, choking-hysterical laugh out of his head for a long time, truth be told. Gamzee had never wanted to know what it could be like, nearly jumping out of his skin listening for his own creaky footsteps. And that must’ve been something else, for Karkat. Knowing the guy he’d trusted his life to, the guy who left sloppy kisses all over his face and sang along to gory clown rap in the car could hunt him. Gamzee could say, “I’m gonna grind your bones, brothers and sisters,” and seem to actually mean it. That version of Gamzee had ripped his St. Michael pendant off and left it on the sticky tile; that version of Gamzee had said he was practically an angel, himself. The Angel of Double-Death. What the fuck had that meant?

Gamzee fidgeted; his actual, unbroken pendant was sweaty against his skin, and he still had fish sandwich sauce to brush off his hands and all over his jeans. He watched the world pass by out the window, luxury hotels and condos, supermarkets and law firms, golf courses and ads for rehab facilities. After a while, he slept. Not easily, you fucking know it. But he _did_ sleep, and when he woke up they were nearly into Georgia and Karkat was playing some of Gamzee’s clown rap, himself. He never listened to that stuff willingly, Gamzee’d thought. He could have sworn he heard Karkat murmuring some of the lyrics, though, in a wistful little voice. 

“Feel better?” Karkat asked, after a while. After Gamzee had stirred enough to knock over one of his juggling clubs, and almost-but-not-quite swiped Karkat’s lukewarm black coffee out of the drink holder and all over his lap. The sun was setting, liquid and electric at the edge of everything. Gamzee squinted into it, stretching his back out as well as he could from the front of that latest borrowed car. 

“Yeah — I better take over for you pretty motherfucking soon, don’t you think? Up at this next exit?” Gamzee yawned into the crook of his elbow, then snickered. “Your turn, my actual goddamn knight. Love of my life.”

“Sure.” Karkat realized the music was still playing, and fumbled to turn the volume down. Would it have been so embarrassing, knowing Gamzee’d heard him? Or maybe he just had some shit to say, now; maybe he just needed to think. Karkat cleared his throat, and squeezed both his hands into the steering wheel, like he was bracing himself for impact. He glanced at Gamzee again, and said, “I’m not scared of _you_ , you know. You’re...”

“That’s good,” Gamzee said, with some cracking-apart in his voice. With some feeling. So those were the stakes: it felt different hearing them in Karkat’s voice. _Scared of you_. It was a transitional thing, wasn’t it? How could anything ever be exactly like it was, if Karkat knew what it was like to be all motherfucking afraid of him? Maybe it wouldn’t mean anything was over, exactly, but of course, _of fucking course_ they would have to be changed. 

“I’m scared _for_ you, Gamzee, and I was scared... when he almost got me...” Karkat breathed. “It almost has nothing to do with you. You’re not going to turn out like that cackling asshole. We’re not going to let you. Got it?” 

“Course I’m fucking not,” Gamzee said. Again and again. I’m here with you. 

“And even if you did...”

“But I’m _not_ , Karkat.”

“ _And even if you did_ , it’s not like you couldn’t still come home. I’d be... honestly, utterly terrified, Gamzee. I’m not gonna lie to you anymore. You keep asking if I’m okay, and no, I’m not.”

“Uh...”

“But I will be. And you’ll be okay, too, or so help me —”

Karkat started in on an elaborate, profane explanation of the sort of vengeance he had planned, if Gamzee turned out to _not be okay_. It involved a couple references to romcoms they’d watched together, stitching up wounds in motel rooms and hoping nobody got too upset by all the empty medical gauze packs in the trash. It involved some painstakingly specific bodily function metaphors, and Karkat was nearly yelling by the end of it. He did that, sometimes. Some of their regular enemies liked mimicking his voice, when he got all scream-y, but none of them could ever sound so effortlessly smart, if you asked Gamzee. So earnest and trying-not-to-be-hopeful. So genuinely good. 

Gamzee drove next, and drank the rest of Karkat’s coffee as the world got dark around them. Karkat fell asleep holding the edge of Gamzee’s shirt, rubbing his thumb against the faded fabric. Obviously Gamzee would do whatever he fucking could to keep this man who had chosen him safe, wouldn’t he? Whatever else he could become; whatever new battles they’d face when they got where they were going next. And protecting Karkat couldn’t be what led Gamzee to become an “Angel of Double-Death” or whatever the fuck, right? 

Nah. 

They drove out of Florida, then, through most of a damp soft night. It didn’t feel like Gamzee could drive far enough to feel satisfied, somehow, but all things considered they made pretty good time. 


End file.
